David Emery Online

Vicennial

1 August 2025

Two decades ago today, I walked into an unassuming converted collection of terrace houses, somewhere in Wandsworth, South London, and began working in the music industry. It was purely by chance that I ended up there, really. Growing up, I had always wanted to work in music, but I never really knew how, or even where to start. I had no connections, no understanding of the industry beyond a vague notion of what a record label was, and certainly no resources to work as an unpaid intern — the “traditional” route in.

I did, though, have a knack for computers — a genetic trait, seemingly, as I ended up doing roughly the same computer science degree as both my parents and brother. That degree took me to working as a graduate at a Mac software developer — an ideal job, perfectly suited to my at-the-time quite specific skill set, in a field that wasn’t exactly awash with roles.

I got made redundant after six months.

In hindsight, it was the most fortunate thing that could have happened, but it sure didn’t feel like it at the time. It led me to bouncing around doing various freelance things, which turned out wasn’t all that sustainable, and so I started looking for jobs. I applied for many — this post could have looked quite different if I got the one looking after AutoTrader’s website — but there wasn’t something that felt “right” until I came across an advert for a Web Developer role at legendary label group Beggars. Fortunately, they seemed to see some potential in me, for which I am forever grateful.

I turned up right when they were entering their imperial phase. The first thing I worked on, according to the scrawled notes on an old paper pad I found recently — I was clearly keen, taking notes never stuck — was a free MP3 download page to promote the latest album “Alligator” by then-new signees The National. The “new media” department, as it was called then, went from strength to strength. I got given a team to manage within less than two years, with a ludicrous lack of anything approaching “management training”. We went from uploading White Stripes music videos in RealPlayer in 320×240 resolution to live streaming Adele gigs to hundreds of thousands of people.

It was a wonderful time of experimentation, with new technology appearing seemingly every week. I remember setting up Jack Peñate on this new site called Twitter, not so that he could send tweets (they weren’t called that yet), but simply so that we could send txt messages from the road that would get piped onto the home page of his website. To my knowledge, Jack was the first musician on Twitter, for what that’s worth in 2025. We let people download stems for a track by Radiohead and let them remix them, mostly because the band thought it would be a fun idea. We did a live streamed AR-generated video with British Sea Power, using Xbox Kinect cameras to bring 3D objects amongst the band as they performed.

AR then — this was probably late 2000s — was, of course, a bit ahead of its time. You could make a pretty good argument the AR still is. So many of the things we tried were. We did fan apps, with communities, live streams, exclusive content — all the things that people are talking about again, but fifteen odd years ago. They worked then, but were hard to keep going, because while some things change, some things really don’t.

Now, it’s easy to look back through coke-bottle-strength rose tints, and it is difficult to separate the macro music and technology industry shifts from, well, being in my twenties, and all of the hope and possibility that brings. I have a sense, though, that some of that experimentation, that excitement, is back. It is, I guess, the natural ebb and flow of things, that following a phase of change, comes a consolidation and status quo, only to be followed again by a push back against that stasis.

It is remarkable looking at all of this in hindsight, because it looks like a straight line when you tell the story, but so much of where I am now — still working in music, with a wife I met through work, kids, the rest — is down to a series of chances, and a bit of luck, that led me to walking through that door in Wandsworth twenty years ago.